Chairman of the House Oversight Committe Darrell Issa has sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter in response to a combative letter sent by Holder late Friday afternoon defending his "truthful and accurate" Congressional testimony from May 3, 2011.

Whether you realize yet or not, you own Fast and Furious. It is your responsibility.

In the letter, Issa isn't buying Holder's latest excuses for "not knowing" about Operation Fast and Furious or the tactics used in the lethal program, saying Holder has reached a disappointing new low.

From the beginning of the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, the Department of Justice has offered a roving set of ever-changing explanations to justify its involvement in this reckless and deadly program. These defenses have been aimed at undermining the investigation. From the start, the Department insisted that no wrongdoing had occurred and asked Senator Grassley and me to defer our oversight responsibilities over its concerns about our purported interference with its ongoing criminal investigations. Additionally, the Department steadfastly insisted that gunwalking did not occur.

Once documentary and testimonial evidence strongly contradicted these claims, the Department attempted to limit the fallout from Fast and Furious to the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). When that effort also proved unsuccessful, the Department next argued that Fast and Furious resided only within ATF itself, before eventually also assigning blame to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona. All of these efforts were designed to circle the wagons around DOJ and its political appointees.

To that end, just last month, you claimed that Fast and Furious did not reach the upper levels of the Justice Department. Documents discovered through the course of the investigation, however, have proved each and every one of these claims advanced by the Department to be untrue. It appears your latest defense has reached a new low. Incredibly, in your letter from Friday you now claim that you were unaware of Fast and Furious because your staff failed to inform you of information contained in memos that were specifically addressed to you. At best, this indicates negligence and incompetence in your duties as Attorney General. At worst, it places your credibility into serious doubt.

Your letter dated October 7 is deeply disappointing. Instead of pledging all necessary resources to assist the congressional investigation in discovering the truth behind the fundamentally flawed Operation Fast and Furious, your letter instead did little but obfuscate, shift blame, berate, and attempt to change the topic away from the Department's responsibility in the creation, implementation, and authorization of this reckless program.

Meanwhile, new subpoenas will be making their way to Holder's desk within the week.

On March 15, two months after a deadly shooting spree in Tucson left a U.S. congresswoman in critical condition, the nations leading gun-control activists took seats in Room 4525 at the Department of Justice to push the Obama administration for more firearm regulation. In the hour-and-a-half-long meeting, Assistant Attorney General Christopher H. Schroeder, who has coordinated the governments work on the issue, went around a long conference table soliciting views from representatives of the major advocacy and law enforcement groups.

But the official the advocates wanted to hear from most stayed mostly quiet.

The silence of Steve Croley, the White Houses point man on gun regulation policy, echoes the decision by Democrats to remain mute on guns as a national issue, even in the wake of the Tucson rampage. Croleys keep-your-head-down approach is in keeping with President Obamas preference for low-key wonks, but in this case, his reticence has more to do with political reality:

Democrats have no plans for serious gun-control initiatives, and the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy, as heart-rending as it was, hasnt changed their minds.

The result for Croley is a tree-falls-in-the-woods conundrum:

If President Obama, like just about every leading Democrat, has abandoned the issue, does the administrations gun policy even exist?

Cro­ley is undeniably present, but he doesnt make a sound.

The buzz-cut gun owner with sharp cheekbones and a genius for regulatory law is, according to multiple advocates, on a listening tour. Activists with whom Croley has conferred described him as enigmatic, though their conversations have yielded certain strong impressions. Croley, who since August has been Obamas assistant for justice and regulatory policy, favors closing a loophole in the law that allows unlicensed gun dealers to sell arms without background checks, especially at gun shows. His background in administrative law has especially prepared him for figuring out

how state agencies can make their records readily available to a federal gun database.

One area in which Croley has shown less interest, according to several people who have spoken with him about the issue, is restricting the large-volume ammunition magazines that allowed the Tucson shooter to keep firing. When Paul Helmke, director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, broached the subject during the March 15 gathering with Croley, officials promptly adjourned the meeting.

Croley, who characteristically declined to speak for this article, has a broad portfolio including good government and transparency issues, civil rights, food safety and criminal justice policy. Guns have accounted for only a small part of his workload, and its an issue with which he has little experience. But Croleys friends and colleagues describe the 45-year-old University of Michigan legal scholar as an extraordinary man of catholic interests and talents.

In fact, its hard to imagine a more presentable face for the administration to spotlight on the gun issue.

Croley grew up hunting deer with his father in DeWitt, outside Lansing, Mich., and went on to attend Yale Law School. He founded a boxing club, and was known to hand out black eyes and swollen lips.

Hed take down guys 40, 50 pounds heavier than him,

said Robert Riley, a friend at Yale and the son of former Alabama governor Bob Riley. A newsletter at Berkeley Law School, where Croley taught in 2000, advised new students to add the jazz pianists Steven Croley Trio to their CD collection and to relax and enjoy drinks at Yoshis with this consummate pianist and tort therapist. This fall, he will preview a documentary about Dutch farmers and gay residents in Saugatuck, Mich., that he made with his wife, Bridget M. McCormack.

(She has a D.C.-Hollywood insider in her family: Her sister is actress Mary Catherine McCormack, who played deputy national security adviser Kate Harper in The West Wing and Mary Matalins blond associate in HBOs K Street.)

Croley himself has movie-star good looks. In 2006, the irreverent legal blog Above the Law named him a finalist in its Law School Dean Hotties contest. (Steven Croley is THE Tom Cruise look-alike.)

More relevant to his current brief, Croleys theoretical perspective of law has steadily shifted to the the nuts and bolts of how things work, according to his friend and University of Michigan colleague Kyle D. Logue. Croley has moonlighted as a special assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and is now widely cited on regulation and tort law. That reputation for pragmatism hit a snag in 2002 when his fingers were mangled in a snowblower accident. He had disregarded the warning label, and he became an on-campus case study:

If one of the countrys leading tort scholars fails to heed an advisory label, professors posited, do such warnings carry any weight?

Its just that sort of question about the role of regulation on dangerous products that has informed Croleys approach to the gun issue.

If you think of guns as the intersection of regulatory policy and torts, then nothing makes more sense than a professor specializing in regulation policy and torts

to work on gun policy, said Roderick Hills, a law professor at New York University and an old friend of Croleys. He suggested that if the Supreme Courts interpretation of the Second Amendment shaped a keyhole for regulation, Croleys job is to make a skeleton key that fits that keyhole.

Hes the right guy, Hills said.

The National Rifle Association, the powerful opponent to any gun restrictions, has yet to make Croleys acquaintance.

He has had zero interaction with us,

said Andrew Arulanandam, the NRAs director of public affairs. One reason for that lack of interaction:

The NRA turned down an invitation to the March 15 session that Croley attended.

In recent meetings, Croley has been less revealing about his views of regulation than he was in his 2008 book Regulation and Public Interests: The Possibility of Good Regulatory Government. In this tome, Croley writes,

The evolution of the regulatory state has not been gradual, but rather reflects accelerated growth in response to periods of crisis and national trauma. In this light, regulation seems not only ubiquitous but inevitable.

But in Obamas Washington, national trauma does not lead inevitably to reform.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D) of New York, who lost her husband in the 1993 shooting massacre on the Long Island Rail Road, recalled a meeting in 2008 with Croley when he served on Obamas transition team.

Basically it was me doing all the talking, and you know what? I probably didnt know who the guy was, she said. That didnt make any difference; it was somebody from the White House.

McCarthy and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D) of New Jersey offered a bill that would ban the clips that hold large volumes of ammunition. The pugnacious McCarthy said that

if the administration continued to stay on the sidelines, she and Lautenberg would get the job done themselves,

but added that she certainly had higher hopes with the administration.

Lautenberg attempted to express optimism. The senator recalled that Attorney General Eric Holder visited him on March 29

Since taking office, the president has done none of that, and before the midterm elections, he shelved a proposal requiring gun dealers to report bulk sales of high-powered semiautomatic rifles. In his State of the Union address, just weeks after the Giffords shooting in January, Obama made no mention of guns.

On March 13, the president wrote an Arizona Daily Star opinion piece that suggested his support for closing the gun-show loophole but made no mention of restricting large clips.

Other leading Democrats, even those traditionally willing to offer full-throated support for gun-control efforts, have grown surprisingly less vocal as they take on more of a national role. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat and close friend of Giffordss, is moving up to become the Democratic National Committee chairman. She declined to comment.

On March 30, the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Jim Brady, who sustained a debilitating head wound in the attack, and his wife, Sarah, came to Capitol Hill to push for a ban on the controversial large magazines. Brady, for whom the law requiring background checks on handgun purchasers is named, then met with White House press secretary Jay Carney. During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control,

to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda, she said.

I just want you to know that we are working on it, Brady recalled the president telling them. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.

In the meeting, she said, Obama discussed how records get into the system and what can be done about firearms retailers.Her husband specifically brought up the proposed ban on large magazine clips, and she noted that even former vice president Dick Cheney had suggested that some restrictions on the clips might make sense.

He just laughed, Sarah Brady said approvingly of the president. Both she and her husband, she emphasized, had absolute confidence that the president was committed to regulation.

In simpler, pre-administration times, so was the presidents point man. In Croleys book, he argued that for all the healthy skepticism,

in a complex world, regulation still amounted to the least-worst solution to pressing social problems.

Thank you God for Daryl Issa. Someone has to be a man and stand tall for this country. We cannot continue to allow laws and rules to be broken anytime the supposed leaders decide to do so. If we get everyone to pay with the consequences of their actions from the President on down to the average Joe... our country will get back on track and laws will be followed and respected and things will right themselves once again.
Had to laugh at the protestor who said he ate better at the protest than he did at his parents. There’s the whole answer right there. Living with his parents at 26 years old, unemployed and not only getting free, expensive food but saying it is BETTER thatn what he gets at his parents. Amazing. Why isn’t he out working paying his own rent and buying his own food?
Here is a protestor getting free expensive food while mocking others. There are people out there busting their butts to put SOME FOOD...ANY FOOD on the table for their families and this idiot makes a statement like he does. Sit him down and try to have an intelligent back and forth debate about something and see how that goes.
God forgive those who are trying to destroy this great country. God forgive them.

7
posted on 10/10/2011 1:59:59 PM PDT
by cubreporter
(Rush Limbaugh... where would our country be without this brilliant man?)

Careful, there, Eric. Screw with Congress and they'll ship your sorry butt down to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas to air out your contempt-of-Congress underwear. You'll cure your attitude -- if you can -- or you'll spend more years down there than Dr. Mudd.

That's a point. I've been thinking the same thing about Sarah Palin and a number of prominent black conservatives like Prof. Sowell and Justice Thomas, who embarrass Obozo and his "boogie society/high ghetto-trash" act just by standing up and being recognized.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.